L.A. Unified ditches homework

The Los Angeles Unified School District just released their new policy that homework will count for only 10 percent of the grade, giving students essentially a free pass to not do a thing.

While there are some lauding the approach as progressive and fair towards students whose home life and economic circumstances makes work outside of the classroom difficult, the overarching move once again takes power away from the teachers who know their student’s situation better than any school supervisor could. According to the Los Angeles Times:

The L.A. approach is intended to account for the myriad urban problems facing the district’s mostly low-income, minority population. It’s also aimed at supporting L.A. Unified’s increasing focus on boosting measureable academic achievement.
According to the new policy, “Varying degrees of access to academic support at home, for whatever reason, should not penalize a student so severely that it prevents the student from passing a class, nor should it inflate the grade.” It was distributed to schools last month.

Homework, however, is not just a teacher’s form of torture meant to overload students and cause problems. There are benefits to doing those geometry problem sets every evening or reading a chapter or two of classic literature. Homework helps students get a better grip on what they’re learning and forces repetition of concepts that just don’t sink in the first time around.

Now, instead of allowing teachers to have some control over how they help their students learn, once again policy makers are enforcing a homogenizing measure that will help some kids pass, but allow anyone to slack off more and learn less.

Indeed, there are students with circumstances that make additional work difficult, but perhaps we should just leave it to good teachers to make that call– teachers who aren’t forced to treat students as just one more test score, but as individuals.

The move accompanies another policy being tested in which student’s grades go up for performing well on state standardized tests. It’s all in the policies now, public school is no longer about teaching the next generation the knowledge and skills to succeed but about looking good in standardized test statistics.